Dust and dirt in Kathmandu

On my last trip to Kathmandu, I got shocked by the reality that my most favorite city is in Asia is also one of the dirtiest and polluted. The air is thick with the dust from construction crews digging up the roads to install water pipelines for the Melamchi Water Supply Project and no one planned to have the roads sealed afterward. There are battered old buses and trucks spewing uncontrolled amounts of diesel fumes in the air. To say nothing of the black clouds billowing from the brickworks dotted around the valley. Then there are the general roadworks that take place in any large city and the result is air that you can’t actually breathe. For most of the days that I was in Kathmandu, the air quality hovered somewhere between very bad and absolutely awful. However, on the other hand when I was trying to conjure up an image in my mind of Kathmandu without the air pollution, the dirt. No rotting vegetables in the gutter, no plastic drop carelessly everywhere, no cow poo to dodge in the middle of the street. Just something clean like Singapore or Salt Lake City I decided I probably wouldn’t like it.